In Julia Alvarez’s speech “Entre Lucas y Juan Mejia”, She start explaining the challenges we faced as an immigrant. She said, “As an immigrant, you leave behind an old world and enter into a new world in which the old ways no longer apply” (1). In my opinion as an immigrant I can related to this quote, because when I came to United States I felt that I entered in a completely new world. In which I had to start a new life with a different language and culture. Also, Julia Álvarez mentioned the challenges she had as a female writer in another country that has a different language.…
Salvador Felipe Jacinto’s “The persistence of memory” painted in 1931 in a town called Catalonia. It is one of Salvador’s most important and critical historical artwork of the surrealist movement and is extremely well known amongst artists all over the world. Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in the Spanish town of Figueres. He is one of the founding creators of the surrealist movement from the early 1900’s. The painting itself is known by millions and is even used in popular culture right into the 21’st century (The Biography. 2015).…
An excerpt from Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Auto Biography tells the story of a boy named Rodriguez who was forcibly required to aspire to English language and forget about his Spanish past. When Rodriguez began going to a Roman Catholic grade school in California with his two siblings, he only knew a handful of English words. He was quiet and could not pay attention in class since he wasn't comfortable with his English capabilities. He barely ever spoke out in class which slowed down his learning compared to the rest of his classmates. After a while, nuns from his Roman Catholic school visited his home and warned the parents they should begin talking more English then eventually strictly English in their household.…
Mike Rose and Richard Rodriguez both support education and the success it brings for an individual, but they support them in different ways and for different reasons. In Mike Rose’s essay he explains how he was an average person in his vocational classes. He says that his intelligence was not on a low level, but rather he thought of his intelligence to be low because of his teachers and the fact he was in vocational classes, but he soon realizes that pushing to the next level was the key to his success. In contrast, Richard Rodriguez explains in his essay about education throughout his life which included his teachers, family background and how it affected his upbringing and success. Mike Rose’s attitude about education and success and Richard Rodriguez attitude both have similarities but also have differences.…
As I began reading the first chapter of ‘Hunger of Memory’, I noticed that the author, Richard Rodriguez, in a satisfied tone, defined his private family as alienated in a public society. A society in which intimacy has a very much different meaning than what he presumed. This notion was primarily based off linguistic differences that, from his point of view as a small child, build a pleasantly intimate bond that kept his family close. Very far distant from the un-intimate world.…
I found Dan-el Padilla Paralta’s biography Undocumented to be a very insightful, enjoyable read. It is certainly a departure from previous readings in this class, as it is not theoretical and is not based on sociological research, ethnographic or otherwise. This is a very personal, longitudinal perspective we have not gotten before in this class. Undocumented follows Paralta’s adolescence and young adulthood, beginning with his immigration to New York from the Dominican Republic when he was four and concluding with him beginning his doctorate program at Stanford and meeting his wife. In between, he details his experiences as a young boy in a homeless shelter in Chinatown, as a high school student living in public housing in Harlem and attending a private prestigious school on the upper west side, as a Princeton undergrad studying Classics, and as a masters degree candidate at Oxford. The book is ostensibly about Paralta’s academic journey, but Paralta also pays close attention to his varied attempts to understand and embrace the dual identities of academic and poor immigrant, as well as his struggle to legalize his…
Luis Javier Rodriguez is a well-known American poet, novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, columnist; his work also includes short story writing and children’s books, but before his writing career, he was an active gang member during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Born in the United States-Mexico border city of El Paso, Texas, Luis grew up with diligent and honorable parents. Luis’ father was a high school principal, while making time to work in factories and construction sites, while his mother was a school secretary and worked as a maid, but even so, he was not able to isolate himself off the streets. Just at the age of 11, Luis identified himself with his first street…
Laura, a Mexican immigrant and student in Rose’s remedial English class, has a completely different frame of reference than California born UCLA students she finds herself in class with. She remembers in detail how her father made a meager living as a “food vendor” in Tijuana. The types of food, the smells and the other items he sold are cannot be forgotten by Laura. She emigrated, with her parents, to the United States at the age of six (Rose 1). These memories keep her connected to Mexico.…
The universal “growing pains” that all children experience in one form or another are easily recognized in Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical excerpt from Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez’s childhood was particularly unique given the fact that while he was born and raised in the United States, he was strongly influenced in the ethnic environment of a Spanish family. Although the reader is introduced to only a short excerpt from the autobiography, he learns a great deal about Rodriguez’s family and his relationship to it, his conflict of speaking English versus Spanish, and the paradox that became evident as he used English as his primary language. Furthermore, the reader learns that Rodriguez’s…
Francisco was born to immigrant parents in 1985 in a rural part of Denton, Texas. They lived in a 2 bedroom, 1-bathroom house which held 8 people. Francisco’s parents always emphasized how important education was, even though none of them had gone to college. His parents had low-income jobs. Growing up in this type of environment taught him many things,…
2. What does Rodriguez mean when he says, “[I]n a way, it didn’t matter very much that my parents could not speak English with ease…. And yet, in another way, it mattered very much” (para.15)?…
“Aria,” an excerpt from the memoir “Hunger of a Bilingual Childhood,” accounts for the author, Richard Rodriguez’s, childhood experience with learning English as a second language. Throughout his essay he represents the power of the individual to defeat the language barrier and how he overcame this particular problem as a child. Being torn between conforming to the “public” language or staying true to his “private” language, he discusses themes of intimacy and language. Throughout his excerpt, he presents arguments against the idea of bilingual education and it’s negative effects on ESL students, like himself.…
In his essay “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez chronicles his journey as a student describing his path to academic success as one of constant, internal turmoil. Rodriguez narrates as a fully educated, successful (by society’s standards) grown man, conveying the sense of loneliness and loss that he no doubt achieved along with his education. On the surface it would appear that he is simply recounting the struggle associated with being from a non-educated, middle class family. Rodriguez is constantly conflicted with self-confidence and the loyalty between home and school. This conflict does make him feel that he…
As a son of Mexican American immigrants, Richard Rodriguez recounts the story of his childhood and his struggle to assimilate into American culture. In Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Rodriguez always felt like an outcast whenever he set foot outside of his house. As a young child, he exclusively spoke Spanish to members of his household and tried his best to learn and speak English in the real world. He “regarded Spanish as a private language. It was a ghetto language that deepened and strengthened [his] feeling of public separateness” (Rodriguez 505) because it identified him as a member of his family and it served as a link to his own Mexican heritage. By speaking Spanish, he communicates a certain level of intimacy with all of his relatives. However, as his narrative progresses, he finds himself slowly breaking away from that intimacy as he begins to speak more English, both by force and social pressure. Teachers scolded him if he spoke anything but English and his peers Americanized his name into Richard (rather than calling him Ricardo.) He began to feel like a traitor by mastering this “public language” when his relatives began treating him differently. His bilingual childhood was an enormous adversity that Rodriguez had to overcome.…
The author used an equal amount of ethos and pathos to persuade the audience even more. The use of ethos in the essay worked to convince because society is able to believe in his credibility. Rodriguez stated, “I wrote a thin book called Hunger of Memory. It was a book about my education, which is to say, a book about my Americanization” (729). When the author says he wrote a book, people will believe him because they think he has experience.…